The creation of the new bus station in Market Place has enabled yet more of Warwick’s past to be uncovered by archaeologists, says Dr Christine Hodgetts.
There were investigations in the 1960s when the modern redevelopment took place, but they concentrated on what was to be built over by Westgate House and the Market Street shops. The redevelopment of the Woolpack in the late 1990s also helped to fill in the jigsaw.
Developers are only required to pay for the investigation of archaeology which will be destroyed by the development, so, the site has certainly not yielded up all its secrets yet.
In the southern corner of the site, at the bottom of the modern street called Puckering’s Lane, the photograph shows a section of cobbled street, estimated to date from the sixteenth century, dipping down over the old town ditch.
It comes as a shock to realise that the line of Market Street was changed so much in the 1960s that some of the remains discovered were of buildings originally on its north side.
Tantalisingly, the excavation was unable to go below this level to unravel the mystery of when during the middle ages this street had been driven through the town ramparts.
It must have been at a time when the fortifications were no longer considered necessary, though in fact new ramparts (bulwarks, they were called at the time) were constructed during the Civil War. At the side and over the top of this surface there was an amount of burnt building rubble, particularly roof tiles.
This had obviously been put here to raise the surface and improve the gradient over the ditch. It is tempting to think that it was debris from the Great Fire of Warwick (1694), of which great quantities had to be disposed of, but we have to remember that a timber-framed town like Warwick had frequent fire casualties, like the groups of houses burned down in 1664 at the top of Saltisford, or in 1706 in Smith Street.
The archaeology of the town centre of Warwick is made difficult by the fact that successive phases of development often scrape away the previous layers, or dig through them to create cellars. Many of the building foundations uncovered sit directly on the underlying rock, but can directly be related to buildings shown on nineteenth century maps, leaving little chance that there is earlier material to discover.
In between the buildings, in courtyards or the small areas of garden still surviving in the nineteenth century, there are sometimes unexpectedly early remains, like the evidence of 13-14c pottery manufacture found under the yards of the Woolpack some years ago. What excited the archaeologists most on this dig are similarly unexpected. They are also the most difficult for the lay eye even to see: Neolithic rubbish pits, surprisingly close to the surface and appearing among the cellars of the Victorian houses.
Fragments of pottery in these pits, as much as 5,000 years old, give the first evidence that Neolithic man had actually lived on the Warwick hill-top, whereas the few previous finds of this date might have been left by people passing through.
The most evocative and self-explanatory finds are the numerous fragments of clay pipe, many encased in lumps of kiln. In the nineteenth century, until the 1880’s, there was a yard behind the Market Street houses, with a tobacco pipe factory in it. The business was probably at its peak around 1850, when the proprietor of the works, his wife and daughters, and five employees were engaged in the craft. There may also have been some independent craftsmen buying space in the kilns. The factory itself was approximately under the walk-way in front of the Saffron restaurant, and some of the pipe makers lived in small houses around the court. The kiln waste, the result of firings that had gone wrong, was not found here, but in the yards of houses further down the site. They give nice examples of the pattern of pipe being produced by these craftsmen in Warwick. It had perhaps provided useful hardcore to stabilise a muddy yard, just as similar damaged pipes were once used on the paths at Hill Close Gardens.
Thank you to Bryn Gethin from Warwickshire Museum, Field Archaeology
